Guidance notes and safety standards to improve organisational safety increasingly encourage safety leadership. However, two things still remain unclear: who are safety leaders and what do they do to ensure safety? This study addressed these questions, looking at low-hazard environments characteristic of service sector organisations.

The study, undertaken by the University of Cranfield, had the following research objectives:

to identify types of safety leadership and to characterise the contexts in which each is displayed

to determine the kinds of practices enacted and shaped by safety leaders at different levels in organisations typical of LHEs

to discover how the safety leadership practices of individual leaders vary over time in LHEs

to reveal the social interaction between workers within organisations operating in LHEs